This WeekFeb 10, 2012

Don’t Talk About It, Do It

Every Friday we take a look back at the week’s headlines, centering on a theme we’ve singled out as particularly important. This week, despite the apathy that greets the idea that meaningful change is possible, protestors continued to make their voices heard. And beyond the streets we were seeing the beginnings of important change—along with the positive and negatives consequences when people start to really do it.

Culture is the antidote to the current “fear of the other, the sense of decline,” and “French culture abroad is a way to make our language, our production, and paradoxically our economy more prominent,” he said.

…if your language’s syntax blurs the difference between today and tomorrow (as do, say, Chinese and German) then you are more likely to save money, quit smoking, exercise and otherwise prepare for times to come

“The mortgage foreclosure settlement in many ways is just the least of their problems,” said James Cox, a professor of securities law at Duke University in Durham, N.C. “The banks are not going to see the bright sunlight for some time to come.”

…the internet played a greater role in violent radicalisation than prisons, universities or places of worship and was now “one of the few unregulated spaces where radicalisation is able to take place.”